


The Problem of Clarice/The Problem of Me: Why Clarice Starling Still Matters

by theimpossiblegeekygrrl



Category: Clarice - Fandom, Hannibal (TV), Hannibal Lecter Series - All Media Types, Hannibal Lecter Tetralogy - Thomas Harris, Original Work
Genre: Apologies, Criticism, Essays, Meta, Real Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-03
Updated: 2020-12-30
Packaged: 2021-03-07 18:14:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26791963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theimpossiblegeekygrrl/pseuds/theimpossiblegeekygrrl
Summary: My thoughts about the cannibalization of a character, after watching the Hannibal series. For the record, I am not a Fannibal, and I wanted to love the series more than I do. At the end of the day, I guess I don’t like wrapping the message of misogyny in tidy meals for the masses to consume.Be warned, this is critique, and if you don't want to hear it, for God's sake don't read it.
Comments: 18
Kudos: 31





	1. Chapter 1

* * *

_And is it right, butterfly_  
_They like you better framed and dried?  
_-Tori Amos-

* * *

When I was nineteen years of age, I found myself in the basement of my state’s largest mental hospital. In an odd, twisted form of life imitating art, the unit for the criminally insane was indeed in the basement of that facility, just as it is the world of _Red Dragon_ and _The Silence of the Lambs_. Then, as I remain to a lesser degree now, I was incredibly naïve, though I had an almost gross sense of confidence that I could face whatever lay ahead of me in the coming weeks.

It was part of the curriculum at the time, to spend two weeks on the unit as part of our clinical training in nursing school. Even though the names of the patients who lived there were not held secret, they were secret to me. I was not one to watch much of the news, as it generally upset me to the point that I had trouble functioning during the day. As I spent time talking to the men on that unit, wearing the best business casual clothes my stipend could buy along with an itchy white lab jacket, I was unaware of what they had done to come to that place. It was never until the after, in that hour of debriefing that students spend with their instructors and classmates, that I would find out just who I had been speaking to.

“You spent the morning playing dominoes and drinking coffee with a man who murdered his entire family, Kay.”

“That man, who helped you with your interpersonal communication log? He killed five people and pled insanity after. How does that make you feel?”

How _did_ it make me feel?

Confused as hell.

I remain so to this day, and I speak about it frequently when conversation with my co-workers take us back to the years we spent in school. I’ve often compared my experience to the way Clarice Starling must have felt, within her fictional world: a fish not only out of water but removed from the earth.

My life has been vastly different, compared to hers. I came from a ‘good’ family, even if my parents were the black sheep and I the wild child amongst a line of gently bred folk. I was expected to be a doctor or lawyer, and whenever I spoke of my desire to become a nurse, I was looked down upon from noses on high, for what a fall that would be from the PhDs and graduate degrees I had descended from.

“Couldn’t you at least get into computers?” a well-meaning cousin once asked. “There’s money there, a lot more than wiping ass for a handful of dollars.”

“Well, then,” I answered. “I guess I’m going to have to wipe a lot of ass to pay the bills.”

During a moment of… desire, one might say, I decided that perhaps I wanted to be an FBI agent, like one of my many uncles. I’ll never forget him sitting across from me at my grandmother’s table, passing me a cup of coffee as his dark eyes, exactly like my own, sized me up from behind the hawkish nose that my mother shares.

“No, baby girl,” he said. “I don’t think I could stand seeing you getting lost in there. It’s still a man’s world, and you’d never be happy in it.”

So ended that hopeful dream. For I viewed him as a god of sorts, and his word was the final one in my mind.

I started university with enough hours to make me an upperclassman, even at seventeen. Call me ambitious, but I was determined to pay my way and do it by myself, even if my grandparents insisted on buying my books, and another uncle routinely stole my car to get the oil changed or put new tires on it, when needed. At eighteen, I was a student nurse, paying for my tiny, unheated apartment by working nights as a nursing assistant in an ICU. And at nineteen, I was speaking to violent criminals, not unlike my fictional heroine.

Life changed quickly. Graduation came and went. I started my first job as a nurse but moved around often between units and specialties. I could never settle down; as soon as I started to shine and take off in a new area, I left. I never had the chance to hit the low ceiling someone else might have set for me. As soon as I felt the walls closing in, the expectations becoming either too great or too little… I was the girl disappearing.

I wasn’t a child when my father died, though I might as well have been. I was thirty years old with a one-week old baby in my arms when my husband told me that my beloved father died in his sleep. It was two days before Father’s Day, and he’d been planning on making my home his first stop so that he could see his grandson again. To have your world fall apart as a child is a terrible thing; to have it fall apart as an adult when you have so many people depending on you is impossible. I was the breadwinner for our family, and there were days that I could not get out of bed except to nurse my child.

The soul heals, even with scars mending it back together, and I must have done so. I went back to work when my son was three months old and went through the motions of life for four years. I even had another child. I love my youngest son with all the breath there is in my body, but I realize that I was desperate to have him because I wanted to feel something other than agony, even for a little while. I wanted to feel that breathless beauty that captured me when I saw my oldest for the first time, that feeling of being hopelessly in love with your child. When they placed him on my chest, after the doctor finished sewing up my belly, I fell in love again. The agony of losing my father remained, and it still does, but love rules it. Tempers it. As it still does.

I left the state-run mental hospital at nineteen believing there were no monsters. Not really. After meeting with men who I felt a weird connection to, who I laughed with, whose asses I kicked playing dominoes (though perhaps they let me win), I believed that people did terrible things. But I never thought that they were born that way.

But that was before I discovered my husband was a monster, in the deepest sense of the word.

I won’t go into the crimes he has committed, though I will say none of them were against our children or any other child. A year after our youngest was born, I discovered his secret life. The lies. The web of deceit he created. I spoke to his family, in the after, who were finally truthful to me about what he was really like. Those things they never wanted to tell me, because he seemed happy when he was with me. They shared what he was like as a child, how troubled he was even then.

“What happened to him? Why is he like this? What did you do to him?” I asked his parents. I was drunk, and not even the alcohol could end the questions in my mind.

“We don’t know, honey,” they answered.

I couldn’t explain his actions, and I couldn’t view him as anything other than evil. I fell deeper into a depression that threatened to kill me. A left a job I was excelling in and that I wanted to stay at because I was too embarrassed after being caught in the empty patient rooms, bawling alone while the world pressed on outside. I started weekly psychoanalysis, which ~~probably~~ saved my life. And I survived.

I started reading again, even more voraciously than I ever had. I learned to read at two, read _The Iliad_ for the first time at six, and have a set list of books I read every year as a rule, to help break of the monotony of academic reading. And always, always on that list were _Red Dragon_ and _The Silence of the Lambs_. I watched _Hannibal_ in the theatre when it was released, and I remember feeling disappointed at the ending. It didn’t feel true. Even though I bought the paperback when it came out, I set it aside, occasionally picking it up and flipping through it, only to set it back down and move on to a reread of something more familiar.

I didn’t read it all the way through until the Hannibal television series came out, which was around the time I tried to claw my ex-husband’s eyes out and ended up throwing him out of the house instead. As attractive as the actors were, and as mesmerizing as the cinematography and the sets were, it didn’t attract me, and I only watched sporadically. I knew it was important – I’m queer, even though I married a man – and I still wanted to support it somehow. I bought the series on iTunes though I didn’t watch them, and I remember feeling sad when it was cancelled. It did push me to read through and finish the book, which I’d been letting moulder on my shelf for over a decade.

Though the book is named _Hannibal_ , and even though critics say that Hannibal Lecter is at the spotlight of the novel, I disagree. ~~Perhaps~~ I read from a wholly female perspective, and for me it tells the story of Clarice Starling, stuck in a half-life that was ultimately was due to the deep-seated psychological issues from her past. And there was no way out, as she wasn’t a quitter, though she would never succeed, as she was dominated in a male-centric world too full of the kind of men who could cow her. People hate the novel’s ending because a mad man broke her free from her childhood traumas and from imagoes she had created of masculinity – a man that she eventually gave herself to when she was arguably less than capable of making her own decisions, good or bad.

I didn’t hate the ending. I understood it, and perhaps I was somewhat envious of it.

Clarice knew Hannibal was deeply flawed and knew the things that flawed him to some degree. And she chose him anyways. He’d been able to medicate her, alter the parts of her psyche that held her back – primarily her inability to stand up to anyone she viewed as fatherly. But he’d not been able to brainwash her, and I think that’s an important point to make. What he was, even during his times of intolerable cruelty, was a good psychiatrist, even if he was not what conventional society views as a good man and may not have had good intentions. But the fact remains that he was a good, if not a brilliant, doctor. And he did what doctors do in the best circumstance. He cured. And not only that, he did what nurses do, in the best circumstance: he healed.

In healing Clarice, she was able to lead him to deeper truths about life, especially about his own, bringing a potential for healing in himself. Just before she offers her breast to him, she tells him that instead of finding a place for Mischa in the world around him, he should focus instead on finding a place for Mischa within himself. What a beautiful idea, that is truly one of those deeper meanings of life: when those we love leave us (which they will do, in one fashion or another), their continued place in our world does not come in the form of another person. It comes in the places we create within ourselves.

Time passed further on in my life, as it always does. Let’s speed ahead and bring us up to this year. I’m as well as I think I’ll ever be. I discovered the Harry Potter fandom during my despondency, which I also think helped save the good parts of me. I’m at a job I love, though I’m now surrounded by men and have to tolerate so much bullshit for being an attractive female. But I’m happy, during most hours of the days, until my dreams haunt me. So, I sleep little, enjoying Mombie time as I create art on my computer and watch reruns on Netflix.

Enter COVID-19.

We hid at home. My ex taught our children when the schools closed and tried to worm his way back into my life. I reminded him that I once threatened to remove an important part of his body if he ever tried my patience again, and he relented. My children have visitation with him during the summer now, and I found myself home, bored and constantly awake with the insomnia that I won’t medicate. Netflix was a cure for boredom on those nights, and I found that the Hannibal series found a temporary home there. I turned it on and watched the entire thing in one sitting, during a long weekend with nothing to do.

And, perhaps for the first time in my adult life since my ex’s absence, I got mad.

I saw other characters – men, mostly – saying the words that Clarice said. Other people with aspects of her story running around the screen. But not her. I saw Hannibal saying the words that he said to her in the books and films… but not to her. To other people. People who didn’t matter. Not like she did.

Not like she still does.

I was able to have one of my long, melancholy thinking spells without the sounds of my children roughhousing or yelling at me to make supper.

I didn’t realize how much of her that I’d kept with me over the years.

I reread a long list of novels yearly, as I’ve mentioned earlier, stories that generally have a heroine I admire. Among those characters and books that I revisit are Frannie Goldsmith from _The Stand_ , Bev Marsh from _IT_ , Camille Preaker from _Sharp Objects_ , Jane Eyre, Hermione Granger and Ginny Weasley from the Harry Potter novels, Clarice Starling, Molly Graham, and Margot Verger from Harris’s novels, to name a few. No matter how many times I read through that list, I still find new things about the stories that I love. A turn of phrase I never noticed. Story structure that makes the fictional world come alive in my mind in different ways. Sometimes I look at what a character said and swear it wasn’t there the year before, as though a character can change their mind from read to read (though Thursday Next might disagree). But Clarice has always been my constant, and probably the character I related to the most. I can see that now, where I haven’t in the last thirty or so years.

I guess I’m trying to make my anger understandable, even to myself. It’s a fictional world, and the Hannibal series is fanfiction at its finest. I’m not stranger to that, as I write enough fanfic myself.

I think what got to me, watching the series with eyes that have been extremely jaded by my life experiences, and also by my years in mental health – as a worker and as a patient – was the undercurrent of… I don’t want to say misogyny, but that’s the closest English word I can come up with. We were given new female characters for sure, though they had been gender swapped from male counterparts, and could have been anyone, been given any name (expect for Freddie Lounds, who stands out as a bright spark). But Molly Graham had her triumph removed, lest we forget that it wasn’t Will Graham or even the police who killed the Red Dragon, but Molly herself. Margot was reduced to a submissive waif, where in Harris’s world she was a strong beast who killed her brother and took his sperm, all by herself. All the women were marginalized in favor of the men, and by the end of the third season they were either dead, facing certain death, missing, or running. Add to that the absence of a character ( _The_ Character), especially as the series progressed, who (I feel) is the core of the story and whose motivations and plight are what drive the work?

I find I don’t care that the showrunners and writers couldn’t get access to her name or the _SOTL_ story from MGM. Whatever. Then write a real prequel to _Red Dragon_. Discover what happened in the land of the before, before Will Graham discovered that Hannibal Lecter was The Chesapeake Ripper.

Except… they couldn’t do that. Graham’s interactions with Lecter had been few, and the discovery of the Wound Man in his office was a reach of Graham’s extraordinary mind.

There is no story.

Fine. _Whatever_. Write good fanfiction then, make a new story that is incredible. But when you can’t access a name, don’t give her words, actions, and history to other people just to put the heart of the story back into it, or because those are the things that make the story beautiful.

It’s discourteous. And to quote the good doctor, discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me.

Here’s what I know about fandom, from my time in it. These stories are fiction. But they are also real, because they are real to us. Actors may meet a character for the first time in an audition. But readers… we’ve known these characters for years. We relate to them. Their drives drive us. Strengthen us. Nurture us. Build us up.

I did what I do when I get mad. I started reading, since that is the answer to everything. I read the old interviews about the series from years past, teasing the world with the thought of Clarice being in the world of the series.

It never happened.

And I posit that it was never planned to happen.

Or else, she wouldn’t have been absorbed into the stories of Will and Abigail. Hannibal would have never told Chiyo about her strength and stability being somewhere between silver and iron. They would have never gone to Florence or whispered about a future in Argentina.

It was just a tease. A way to draw people in for another season.

Would you ever do that to a male lead character? Fuck no, you wouldn’t. Because men would protest. We women, who grew up admiring Clarice… we took it. Tolerated it. Just as we’ve always been made to tolerate the male dominated machine. I wanted not to care because of the gay subtext, but in the end, my love of anything associated with my extended ‘family’ could not overcome my very real sense of betrayal.

So, I did the other thing I do when I get mad. I started writing, with a goal to write Clarice back into her own story. But here’s the problem – how do you do that when a character’s meat has been butchered, cooked, and cannibalised by the other characters? When she’s been loaned out, as she was at the FBI? When she’s been used up completely, just as she was towards the middle of _Hannibal_?

You give her a new story, that’s what you do.

Mikkelsen’s Hannibal doesn’t see himself as Hopkin’s Lecter: the Quasimodo - a good man stuck in an insane mind. This new interpretation is akin to the devil, a fallen angel or demon that is walking the earth and breaking the beautiful things of God’s creation to amuse himself.

After living with a man who my family calls the devil, I can tell you this: the one thing that the devil loves and longs for is a taste of beauty and of Heaven, and he’ll devour anything he can to get closer to it. We see that in the series, when Hannibal is moved by beautiful things, whether that be music, food, or murder. In my childhood church, Hell was described as the absence of God, and therefore the absence of anything beautiful, as God is beauty and Love itself. I don’t believe in Hell or the devil, though I respect and understand the sentiment.

Where in the novels Hannibal needs and admires Clarice for her constancy and strength, the world I created was one where Hannibal needs Clarice because he sees her an angel or as salvation. Being with her makes him feel as though he is home in the Heaven he still longs for, though he’d never admit to wanting. He’s also frightened of her, because of her vast capacity to love without condition. I also decided that she should be a doppelganger for Mischa, further adding to his conflict of self, and I attempted to make her his mirror – sexually fluid, dangerously intelligent, and psychologically fractured. She is full of desire and is open about those things, the foil for his continued repression (for as much as the canon!Lecter and Hopkins!Lecter is repressed from probable PTSD, I’d argue that the Mads!Lecter is just as repressed, though it takes different forms).

I don’t know if it worked. It’s not done yet, as the story grew from a 30 000 word novella into a still growing 160 000 word monster, since I could not let myself stop writing until it felt right to stop. I’d go on another 100 000 words, but I’m finally feeling the need to end it.

I thought after writing her back in, in my own way, that I’d be less angry. I am and I’m not. For my story isn’t canon, she is and isn’t herself, and she’ll never be in the series, not anymore or ever. Not after so many examinations of scenes to help me better link my story to the series.

Because, as with Abigail, a place was not made for her.

Instead of mad, it makes me sad. Sadness does not come without its own form of anger with me, because I don’t like tears, whether internal or external. I’ve cried enough for one lifetime.

There’s a new series that will be on CBS soon, all about Clarice in those terrible seven years between her graduation from the Academy and her fall from grace at the Fish Market. I don’t know if I want to watch it. I know what her life should look like, if it’s true to canon – I watched my mother hit that low glass ceiling, always being pushed down by the men in her department. And I’m feeling it myself now. The men I work with are wonderful, and they’d give me their hearts if I needed one, but they also remind me frequently that I am female, and therefore am other and often not welcome. Not privy to some conversations. Excluded by many of our male patients due to what I lack between my legs, and therefore my dudes say ‘Let us take care of this hon – we got this for you. Go finish up the paperwork or call in some meds. Make a phone call with that sexy voice of yours.’

To which I raise my middle fingers, saluting them as I leave the room and take care of things myself.

Because, in the end, and as Clarice pointed out to Jack Crawford when she was treated as such, it matters. And it still matters, even in 2020.

Can I watch the Clarice from the nineties, hitting the hurdles set up by Paul Krendler, constantly being loaned out to other departments because she is capable, yet never being assigned to the BAU and never being allowed to live up to the high potential shown when she found Buffalo Bill?

I’m almost in tears as I admit that I don’t know. As my Clarice would say – I want to. But she is not me.

_And I don’t know._

Update: 12/09/10 - Here’s the thing. I watched the teaser, and the answer is an unequivocal... yes. Because in the end, Clarice is somehow still me, even now. Especially now.

What do you do with all your rage, Clarice? 

Well, Kay... What have you done with yours?


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which I rant. 
> 
> A lot.
> 
> And curse.
> 
> A lot.
> 
> And don't proof well. And get on a very high horse and refuse to get off of it. Because I don't have to. It's my theory, my conspiracy, *allegedly*, and my essay. And I take great pride in the fact that I'm not alone.

* * *

_After all_  
 _What were you really looking for_  
 _And I wonder when will I learn  
_ \- Tori Amos -

* * *

After reading so many blatantly misogynist comments about Clarice during the fandom shitstorm that has become the response to the _Clarice_ series on CBS, I have some additional thoughts.

Oh boy howdy, do I.

I have never been so angry with fandom as I have been with a certain segment of the Hannibal fandom, to the point that I’m out and done. I have spent six months writing a story that I don’t even want to finish anymore. I don’t even want to watch any movies with Mads Mikkelson or Hugh Dancy, because seeing their faces makes me want to throw my remote at the television.

If I see one more comment about the world not needing another ‘girl boss’ series (fuck you whoever said that) or that it’s going to be a mental health breakdown every week (are you FUCKING kidding me, that was the whole first and second season of _Hannibal_ )… _ohhhhh, Jesus Christ._

The human brain does not separate fictional and real characters. It only recognises distress. And my blood pressure has never been so high.

_Until…_

I realized that so many of these comments are written by persons who are basically… clueless.

That’s a problem.

We don’t know our history anymore, and most people don’t really know or remember the history of women in fiction or the larger world, or the history of the normalization of talking about rape, miscarriage, sexual harassment, microaggression, and the whole host of women’s issues that the female slant of Clarice Starling helped bring to the forefront in male-dominated genre.

Bear in mind that _Silence of the Lambs_ novel was released in 1988 and the setting was 1983. That means _Hannibal_ took place in 1990.

This was pre-Anita Hill. Pre-Monica Lewinsky. Pre-MeToo. Way pre-Trump presidency. AIDS was called GRID in 1983 (Gay-Related Immune-Deficiency), if it was ever mentioned on the news (the first MMWR about the strange new disease was written in 1981). Per Rutgers there were 2 female Senators in the 98th Congress and only 21 female Representatives. That’s 23 women in a Congress of 485 people. (In comparison and still abysmal, the 116th Congress, which is the current one, there are 126 women. But hey, that’s almost a fourth. Progress is slow.)

That may not mean anything to the people who have only seen the movie or who were born after the Reagan presidency. But to women reading that book in the time that it was written, Clarice was a fucking breath of fresh air.

If you only know movie!Clarice, gave the novel a cursory glance and didn’t consider the time that she was living through, _you don’t know her_. You don’t know the cerebral conversations she had in her head about the treatment of women by men during the time that she was in the FBI Academy and after. I still can’t believe the book was written by a man. Thomas Harris _got it_ in a way I don’t think most men really got it or still get it – how men talk down to women (and oh was it bad back then). You only see a glimpse of what Clarice was thinking in the movie when she calls Jack Crawford out about his treatment of her when they found the woman in West Virginia with the glittery nail polish: “It matters, Mr Crawford”. What a brave girl, a student to say that to the head of the BSU. But you get the meat when you are a party to her internal monologue in the books.

I keep reading people comment that she’s not a strong character, not as strong as Will or Hannibal.

If you think that, you need to reread the novels with the slant of having been a woman born with a uterus and having lived during the time she did.

Women were excluded from the FBI except as office personnel (and even then, their ears were too precious for many of the words coming from the agent's mouths – read John Douglas’s _Manhunter_ – don’t watch the show on Netflix, read the damn book). And not by violating the law – persons under the height of five feet seven inches were not recruited as agents. That disqualified most women, and that rule was not changed until 1975, after the Hoover years were over. Clarice was stuck in a hiring freeze when she decided to apply. That means she decided she wanted to join the FBI and the BSU when women agents were still new and when the BSU was pretty much still a newish department and under TONS of scrutiny. So when you see the men at the Academy stare at Clarice and Ardelia in the movie – they are doing so because it was still a novel thing to see a woman there.

Women lived with… God, I can’t even go into it without getting upset.

We lived with such shit.

We TOOK such shit.

And there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it, legally or otherwise.

I was a kid when _SOTL_ took place. But I was one of the preternaturally aware kids, thankfully not in the terrifying way Dr Lecter was. I learned how to read when I was two (and by two, I was reading the newspaper, not learning my ABCs). I grew up in a politically active family. My mother worked for the government and was often one of the only women in her facility. And I listened and watched everything that was said and done around me. You know how adults think kids aren’t paying attention? I was, and I listened to my feminist (though deeply conservative) mother talk about the plight of women.

Micro and macro aggressions of sexual nature were pretty damn common. There weren’t sexual harassment trainings with HR in the 80s, and you didn’t report it if it happened to you. You took it and prayed that it didn’t get worse than words. Boys would be boys, after all. If I had a nickel for every time I heard that from high school counsellors and college advisors I wouldn’t have to work. As an aside, I vividly remember an older student (male) who in front of a teacher (also male) made a rude gesture related to cunnilingus to me, in the middle of class when I was in junior high. The teacher saw it and did nothing. I was told to ignore him. I was a 13-year-old virgin, and the whole thing upset me, a lot. Thank God for my hippy-dippy liberal dad who chewed out the administration. It at least got the jerk a detention and the teacher a reprimand (I got transferred to another class with a hell of a lot of retaliation from the boys, but that’s another story for another day).

I bring that up because of Paul Krendler, a very well written, smarmy character in his own right. I think people who view Clarice out of context see her as weak because she didn’t stand up to him more than telling him off. She was mouthy, and she said exactly what was on her mind to the person pissing her off. You want to know the bravery of a freshman FBI agent in 1983 telling off an assistant deputy at the DOJ? It’s what she did, and it’s why she never advanced, folks. He wouldn’t let her, and there wasn’t anything she could do about it. There weren’t corporate compliance laws or whistle-blower protections. If you wanted your job (like she did and like my mother did), you had to take it and take it and take it until it ate you up inside.

Which is what happened to Clarice. The anger ate her up, the injustices that had been placed upon her because an ‘accident’ of nature made her an attractive, smart, capable woman. I think that’s the beauty of her eating him, and probably why Dr Lecter set up the event that would have her eat Paul Krendler’s inferior brain. She got to physically consume the man who had caused her so much grief, who basically went after her because she refused to sleep with him and refused to quit her position at the FBI after his retaliation against her. She got to eat what ate at her. Hallelujah to poetic justice.

I’ve also been reading about how she’s weak because Dr Lecter brainwashed her.

 _No_. No he didn’t.

This is another time when knowing your history is important.

Lecter used perverse manifestations of classical therapy techniques (i.e. dressing up as her father and digging up her father’s corpse) instead of using visualization during therapy sessions. Which… awful, but Lecter is a monster.

He did drug her. Yep, that happened.

However… if you read the book, the drugs and the therapy techniques were not to brainwash her, as mentioned in my previous chapter. The man wanted to heal her, and he tried to do it in the only way his twisted mind could manifest making that healing happen. Mild hypnosis and hypnotic meds are no longer used in common psychiatric practice. But… in the sixties and seventies, when novel!Lecter would have been practising medicine, they weren’t that uncommon. It’s something to think about. Even though he was reading journals and knew the updates and outdates in psychiatry, it’s difficult to teach an old dog new tricks, especially if they work.

It’s noted in the novel _Hannibal_ that when she came downstairs for the dinner for three with Paul Krendler, that Dr Lecter wondered if she was carrying a gun. He left it for her, after all, with her wallet, keys, and purse at the beginning of her stay with him at the house on the Chesapeake shore. He showed her that her car was in the garage. She had the opportunity to kill him and leave. He knew he couldn’t predict her, despite his best efforts to control her and using meds that ‘held her’.

She didn’t leave. Clarice stayed, and she even stayed for dinner.

The desire he had to sublimate her personality for Mischa’s: it was, in the end, a failure. As much as he wanted to take her to Mischa’s place in the world, it was Clarice who refused and pointed out to Lecter that if she had a place within her for his father’s memory to live, then Dr Lecter should have a place within himself for Mischa to live. She outwitted him, and Lecter admits to as much in Chapter 101 of the novel (without admitting it – that chapter is in Lecter’s POV and he’d never admit to being outwitted, he actually took credit for her resourcefulness which I still side-eye whenever I read it. ‘He built her better than he knew’, just shut up and appreciate her Dr Lecter, _Jesus_ ).

I’ve read over the years that the statement ‘what she (Clarice) remembers from the old life, what she chooses to keep’ shows of Lecter’s continued control over her. I say nay, especially after leaving a life and marriage I _choose_ to remember little of. Again, note the word ‘chooses’ or choice in the narrator’s commentary in Chapter 103 of the _Hannibal_ novel. It was her decision to leave that life behind her. She remembers Ardelia, sends her a ring and tells her not to worry. She could just as easily sent her a note saying ‘I’m in Argentina, get me the fuck out of here, he’s crazy’. But she assures her that she’s fine and tells her not to look for her. She took the memory of Jack Crawford with her. Of Hannah (the blind horse whose dilemma she was as affected by as a much as the lambs she couldn’t save, but _The Silence of the Horse_ isn’t as effective a title) and her father. But maybe not of Paul Krendler.

And I’ve read comments about ‘great, another procedural show’. I watched the first two seasons of _Hannibal_. Did you? It was a procedural in fancy clothes until it jumped the shark. And not even an accurate procedural at that.

WHERE THE HELL… _nooooo_ , Kay, quit it.

Well, fuck it.

THE BAU DOESN’T DO PROCEDURAL FIELDWORK.

Did the people in the back hear that? Bryan Fuller, did you hear that? What about ya’ll at CBS with the _Criminal Minds_?

Things got a little twisted in Red Dragon because Dr Lecter sent Tooth Fairy after Will Graham, and you see folks doing procedural work to save his ass. Will Graham was unique and had to feel out a crime scene in person to give a profile. However, in real life, the BAU is a _Think Tank_. Seasoned, veteran agents examine major crimes at Quantico and send a profile to the community law enforcement officers to help _them_ find an unsub, and they do a ton of education. The BAU doesn’t do the field work and find an unsub. No, no. No, no.

“The showrunner was the showrunner for _Discovery_ and boy didn’t that suck up the Trek Franchise, so _Clarice_ will suck too”. Are ya’ll bots or just trying to stir shit up. Series co-creator, co-writer for the first season of _Discovery_ was Bryan Fuller. He's still listed as an executive producer. Living Dead Guy is still listed among the production companies. *pfft* Either you think we’re dumb or your memories are as short-lived as a gnat’s.

"Clarice Starling was always just a knock off of Dana Scully" or whatever. Sure. Make yourselves feel better. Because Clarice was written first, after all. Her story didn't deal with the supernatural, has nothing to do with the suspension or creation of belief, is grounded in reality, doesn't gloss over women's issues in the FBI, Clarice isn't a doctor from a good family... I can go on, because I'm on quarantine and I've got all day.

”Clarice was a Mary Sue!” Errrr... and series!Will wasn’t?

“But Season 4, Bryan would have done Clarice justice!” I’m sorry, _I THINK NOT_. Not when her story and quotes and all the bits were given away to Will Graham and Abigail Hobbs and Chiyoh (between iron and silver, just *middle finger up up up*). No place was made for Clarice at the table. SHE GOT USED UP BEFORE SHE COULD EVEN HAPPEN. Why? Not because he couldn’t get her rights after the fact of getting the rights to _Hannibal_ and _Red_ _Dragon._

It’s because her story was already being written for a series WITHOUT Dr Lecter, about the seven years that happened _WITHOUT_ Dr Lecter.

I’ve heard Bryan Fuller say and have seen it quoted from him that (paraphrasing) ‘they thought they could tell her story without him (Dr Lecter)’. Read that. They didn’t option his rights because they wanted to talk about Clarice, and her childhood, and what made her the woman she was. It also tells me something bigger: that Clarice’s name and story was likely obtained FIRST and WITHOUT Dr Lecter’s.

 _Oh my god, a woman’s story can be told without one of the men in her life!?_ Let me clutch my pearls and someone grab me a sweet tea while I wake up from having the vapours.

*eye roll*

One could say Bryan Fuller got the sloppy seconds, ‘cause you can’t tell Hannibal’s story and give him _the story arch the series wanted him to have_ without Clarice’s ghost moving through it. You apparently can't even tell the story about a Dante specialist without referencing _Gabriel's Inferno_ (Hannibal wears a bow-tie now, just like Gabriel Emerson, because bow-ties are cool).

What makes Dr Lecter all the more compelling is that a man everyone thought was a psychopath/sociopath (even though what he was is nameless) felt empathy for Clarice. Something about her moved him, to the point that her place in the world was special enough to be an acceptable host for Mischa, the sister whose memory he treasured. He never felt empathy for Will Graham in the books. Novel!Lecter despised him for catching him and wanted him dead (mostly for amusement, since he had oodles of time to pass in his cell).

The truth: Novel!Clarice existed without Hannibal for seven years. She even lived without Jack Crawford for seven years. Even though they spoke in passing he hadn’t taken a close enough look at her to see that she’d never had the gunpowder removed from her cheek. That says a lot. Clarice thought about Dr Lecter in passing every day, but he was be _persona non grata_ while he was missing. No one liked saying his name, it created a visceral reaction to the people involved with his case. She could have and did move on in her life until his case was forced back on her after her downfall at the Fish Market. She could have kept moving on without him, in her low-ceiling life.

Note that in _Hannibal_ , Buffalo Bill is rarely mentioned. In her therapy sessions at the end of the novel, Dr Lecter probes into the issues of Paul Krendler and her father. Not Buffalo Bill. Not her mother (who she was not returned to after the mishap at the ranch, why?) and not the rancher (who Dr Lecter believed sexually abused her. Note that crying lambs sound a lot like crying children. A LOT like children. I have always thought the lambs were more than lambs, but that’s another essay).

Dr Lecter felt perverse, but real, empathy for Clarice and her plight (as an ambitious woman in her position and as an individual). He revealed his empathy further when he wrote to her after her disgrace. He thought about her every day in a different way and became obsessed with her. It was so obvious that Mason Verger and his lackeys used it to get him caught. Does this sound familiar? It should, because it’s the goddamn plot of the _Hannibal_ series. If you love series!Will, you actually love Clarice, because they are the two characters that are the actual conjoined twins of the series – you can’t have series!Will without Clarice’s ghost connected to his side. Sorry, not sorry for pointing that out. If you deny it, I don’t know what the hell to tell you.

The truth? The _Clarice_ series has been in development hell for almost a decade. It was optioned for Lifetime around the same time _Hannibal_ was optioned at NBC, but it faltered and kept faltering. I’m sure the ratings bomb that _Hannibal_ was at NBC (no matter how debatably good it was, no one watched it) didn’t help the situation much. I recently polled the people I work with (a small sample in a Southern town, but as we’ve learned from the elections, middle America counts for more than what we realize). In an office of 30 people of different ages, genders, races, ethnic and sexual orientations, I was the only person who remembered the series five years after the last episode. All but two persons had watched _SOTL_ at some point, in the theatre or at home. (Have a fun afternoon and poll your acquaintances outside of fandom who don’t listen to you talk about your fandom – I think we often forget we are a niche group.)

As I’ve said on other platforms, there is a beautiful poetic irony that Dr Lecter and Clarice have become a modern Pyramus and Thisbe. Until their rights are placed back in the same hands, they will be separated by that thin wall. Thomas Harris, could you write an actual follow-up to _Hannibal_? Or better yet… don’t. The ending with Dr Lecter and Clarice forever dancing on the balcony in Argentina is as gorgeous as Will and Hannibal in perpetual motion while they fall from the cliff, and echoes their stories so well.

I’m also going to include something I wrote on my Tumblr (yes, I still have a Tumblr, and a Livejournal and a Dreamwidth, it’s hard to let go).

_Don’t you think it’s a coincidence..._

_That Clarice was finally greenlit this spring after almost a decade in development hell._

_And suddenly Netflix picks up (loudly) the Hannibal series and (quietly) two of the Hopkins movies a few months later?_

_And magically there is a reunion of the Hannibal cast this summer, making a clambering for Season 4 start all fresh for a new breed of young, thirsty fans?_

_And eagerly the cast and crew start calling for a Season 4 in interviews and on social media, speculating about it all fresh and new, even though it was a ratings bomb for NBC that was cancelled 5 years ago?_

_And tragically when the Clarice premiere is announced... there’s an angry mob ready to take her down?_

_That doesn’t sound like a coincidence to me._

_That sounds like **social engineering.**_

_It reeks of the tail wagging the dog._

_And I’m inclined to think that I may never watch anything Bryan Fuller or his team produces ever again._

I’m also going to reiterate the blatant misogyny in the series. The powerful thoughts and actions of ALL the women in the actual canon were given to the MEN in the television series. You can’t gender swap two characters and get away with that, because in the end Alana Bloom was masculinised and turned into a borderline sadist when her power was given back. (A psychiatrist in a State institution who removes an inmate’s/patient’s toilet and makes him wear dignity pants? Have you ever heard of civil rights violations? The toilet seat is one thing, but the toilet? WTF Alana? As an aside, I hate gender swapping. In actual world building, gender has as much to do with creating a character as does their race, geographic location, sexual orientation, age, education, etc. You change one, and you get a character with new motivations who may not commit the actions the canon character would - essentially you get OCs.) Thank god Freddie Lounds was awesome. Reread my first chapter for the standout examples. We need to move forward as a society, not backwards, and one would think that a gay man would know better than to take any kind power away from a group who are still as marginalized as women. You don’t believe me about that? You a denier? Then go back to the American 2016 elections and read all that shit said about why Clinton should not be elected for the only fact that SHE WAS A WOMAN. But maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. My GBFs often compare the female vagina to a ‘mucous filled hole’ or a ‘slime pit’. In front of me, and laugh when I get offended, not only as a queer woman but as a WOMAN. Read more about that issue in [The Guardian](https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/sep/04/they-just-wanted-to-silence-her-the-dark-side-of-gay-stan-culture) and [The Advocate](https://www.advocate.com/commentary/2018/7/20/gay-men-can-be-misogynists-too).

So where does all this leave me, after having big thinking thoughts? Cause it’s all about me, dammit – and it’s my essay.

Well, I spent six months writing a story for the Hannibal series that I’m probably going to delete. Almost 200,000 words wasted. _AHHH!_ Oh well. It was a good way to avoid the second draft of my novel, and it’s way past time to get back to editing that. You know what, I might finish it, because in the end it’s my middle finger standing up for Clarice’s ghost, and I enjoy nothing more than shouting ‘Fuck You’ to assholes.

For my Yule fire, I burned my Hannibal series DVDs and fandom memorabilia and tossed my Hannibal and Will prayer candles in the bin with it (What? Weren’t they sold out on Etsy after Bryan Tweeted about them? I could have Poshmarked that shit, but I enjoyed the fire more than the money). I want nothing to do with Bryan Fuller story-run shows ever again. I might not want to have anything to do with fandom ever again, except for the HP corner I still lurk in when the mood strikes.

The Harris fandom is lucky as fuck to see the longevity of these characters and of the story for almost _forty years_. That’s not the norm, that’s the exception. And if we’re lucky, they are going to keep making movies and tv series about these characters, and it’s not going to be with Tony Hopkins or Jodie Foster or Mads or Hugh or all the rest. I know everyone wanted to see Hugh and Mads kiss (except for me, oddly - I love watching men fuck, but UST IS LIFE), but you know what? Life and media ain’t Burger King, and you can’t have it your way (or else Snape would have lived on in secret during the Cursed Child – JKR missed a huge opportunity and I’m pissed at her for SO MANY THINGS). If these characters are going to live on – the characters, not the actors – they are going to live on in a host of other people and formats. I used to be excited about that – FUCK was I excited for a hot minute when the _Hannibal_ series debuted. But now? Now I look back on all this with disappointment, just as I look back at the time I spent loving on _The OA_ with so much regret.

Because of fucking fandom wank, yet again ruining a fandom. And sadly in this one, their ‘creator’ is the wank king.

To quote Tori Amos: I wonder when will I learn? Probably not anything anytime soon, Kay.

Trolls, do your best. But I’ve got comment moderation on, so anything I don’t like is gonna be deleted and forgotten as soon as I hit the delete key. Fuck you very much. I’m a proud, ‘slacker’ Gen X-er who marched for gay rights during the AIDS crisis when people sent me and my friends death threats for being out and loud, and I still don’t give a flying fuck what anyone thinks about me or my opinions. My mom is a boomer, just like Clarice is, and women wouldn't have the rights they do without our Lost Generation, Greatest Generation, Silent Generation, and Baby Boom women paving the way for everything that has come. You want to know who my real heroes are? My grandmothers. One crossed the Dust Bowl and worked in a shoe factory to escape a dying farm after a shotgun wedding with my grandfather (actually, my great-grandfather chased after them with a gun because he didn’t want her to leave), and the other received a Master’s Degree in the American Deep South when higher education was largely saved for MEN. They were and are the greatest women I’ve ever known, and I thank my creator for them every damn day. Along with my mother, they taught me how to be strong and reinforced the idea that I can be a woman who is awesome without a man and without a partner. I’ve been thinking about the impact Clarice Starling has had for thirty years, and you ain’t changing my mind. And for persons who agree with me, I’ll add more if the mood strikes.

As I said before: It still matters. I’m watching the last reboot of _Black Christmas_ as I write the first draft of this. It’s got a weak ending, but…. what a social commentary it is on the way women are STILL treated. It’s almost 2021. It STILL matters.


End file.
